OStatic

April is fast approaching, and that can mean only one thing -- the jackalopes have returned from wherever it is that jackalopes overwinter, and they're making their way to mirrors and torrents near you. The alpha stage of the Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) release is now behind us, and the first beta version was sighted on mirrors worldwide just moments ago.

While the world won't see the official Jackalope release until April 23rd, the Ubuntu team invites any interested in Jackalope (bug) hunting to download the beta version and join the party.

Earlier today, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth announced the latest addition to the Ubuntu development ecosystem: the Karmic Koala. This release (also referred to by its scientific classification, Ubuntu 9.10) will be unleashed six months after Ubuntu 9.04 (the Jaunty Jackalope) debuts in April.

Shuttleworth hints creatively at some goals for the Karmic release, and manages to make servers, desktops, and netbooks seem as though they're only a link or two away from koalas on the evolutional chain. The server edition will have a special focus on cloud computing, and will include Amazon EC2 tools as well as (you guessed it) Eucalpytus for creating custom, localized cloud configurations. Karmic Koala's server edition will focus on reducing energy consumption.

Desktop Koalas have some internal genetic alterations -- such as flicker free X initialization (in the spirit of Fedora 10) and boot speeds that suggest jungle cat over arboreal marsupial. Shuttleworth also hints at how different this desktop will look. Will the Karmic Koala break from the traditional Ubuntu brown?

How would you like to get involved in engineering the Koala?

Today, both Ubuntu and openSUSE are releasing beta versions of their upcoming releases.

Ubuntu's 8.10 is in its first beta version, and openSUSE 11.1 plans on issuing its second beta release shortly.

A bug surfaced recently in the pre-release versions of the 2.6.27 Linux kernel (up to 2.6.27rc7). The bug affected the e1000e driver module, which supports a number of onboard Intel ethernet adapters. The driver would corrupt the EEPROM/NVM of adapters with ICH8 and ICH9 chipsets, rendering them useless.

The silver lining was that since the kernel is a pre-release, only distributions with releases in the alpha or beta stages, or custom compiled testing kernels, were affected. The Intel team released a patch Wednesday to prevent further damage.